All Fall Down
By: SurreptitiousFox245
Disclaimer: I don't own Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age. All rights go to their respective peoples.
Quick Author's Note: Sorry this took so long...I don't really have much of an excuse. I do want to clear one thing up before we begin, though - LYS IS NOT THE DRAGONBORN! It will get explained in detail in the next chapter, but I wanted to establish that. Otherwise, if you have any questions about something I don't clear up enough, let me know and I'll try to answer them without giving anything away.
Enjoy!
"I'm stronger now, even after everything that you did.
I'm still alive and kicking.
I'm better now.
I'm awake now.
I can see everything in front of me, now."
~Nonpoint "Alive and Kicking"
Chapter 1
Thedas - 9:30 Dragon
The screech of birds chirping directly in your ear had never sounded so melodic.
Within the inky blankness and minimal consciousness of which you had been awarded, darkness met you. Slowly, you began feeling small things – a feather-light touch skittering across your forearm, a cool moisture tingeing the air shallowly flowing into your lungs. Sounds began entering the forming picture of where you were located – leaves rustling upon bark and other leaves, bullfrogs croaking a mating ballad. A forest, the metallic scent of damp earth and moss clear, but a picture of it never formed. Even upon prying your eyes open, light was not met. Only darkness followed, and that was how you concluded bemusedly that you were blind. The distinct lack of supernatural knowing you had grown accustomed to in the past year denoted that your hindrance went beyond being merely physical.
Disorientation was to be expected. It took several moments for you to realize that you were lying on earthen ground instead of leaning upon a rock or tree as you'd initially thought by the sharp point of a thick root digging into the middle of your back. The, admittedly, somewhat diluted vivaciousness of the birdcalls made you tentatively speculate that it was still at least slightly daylight, the bullfrogs furthering that to probably late afternoon or early evening. Sunset, you wanted to believe. Pushing the panic sprouting from the loss of one of your senses to the back of your mind, you focused instead on what you remembered last.
You had sunk to your knees now – pride and propriety be damned, this was the end of the gods' forsaken world as you knew it – and the mountain around you began to crumble, piece by frozen piece. The scene flashed before your still vivid mind's eye. The deafening roar of stone rolling across stone only to vanish into nothing seconds later, cheers as they accomplished their goal. Fading, you remembered, when you shouldn't have faded at all. Perhaps your sight was recompense for still existing when you should've been nothing.
Or, maybe you were enough of them to have been reabsorbed into whatever convoluted afterlife of which they thought they belonged. As humorously stupid as the idea was, you still allowed it to be entertained for a brief moment. Throwing aside that the area didn't have an inkling of the…purity, for lack of a better term, associated with Aetherial magic, the fact of the matter was plainly that you didn't know, and it frightened you. You could no longer See, in more ways than one, and that just drove the imaginary dagger deeper into the gooey, watery flesh of your now useless eye sockets.
"Damn," you breathed, dragging a hand through your hair once the appendage managed to blindly find the top of your head, an old habit mixed with fumbling effort that should not have been there. That frustrated you, too, and you whipped your head up and back against the ground with a thwack! "Ow."
For how long you laid there, trying to decide what to do next, you didn't know. It could've been minutes, hours, or days; without the eternally viable passing of light, you didn't hazard to guess as lost in thought as you were. Eventually though, the sound of a bowstring slowly being pulled semi-taught made you wary enough to heave yourself into what you supposed could pass for a sitting position. As embarrassing as the scrabbling to ensure you didn't hit your head on anything was, you recognized the lack of choice as you pondered the sound you'd heard. It was slight, barely there. Had you not had mer blood in you and the acute hearing that wrought, you never would have registered it at all. The severity of the sound indicated heightened senses. Probably a trade off for your vision, you noted dully. No one ever said the Godhead didn't have a sense of mercy – or humor, as was more likely. It had always seemed to enjoy fiddling with you, and you somehow doubted the current excursion in which you found yourself was something as mundane as an accidental displacement. It simply didn't do "accidents".
"Accidentally-on-purpose"…well now, that was certainly more plausible.
A hand sliding to your belt reassured you that at least the glass dagger was still there. The magika thrumming beneath your fingertips, still potent, gave you confidence. "Who's there?" A pause ensued – brief, but lingering enough for it to register as suspicious.
"An elf who speaks in the common shemlen tongue so close to a Dalish camp?" the voice, obviously male yet of a resonating lilt screaming something other than human, tersely scoffed after a moment. "I'd hazard to say you should be ashamed of yourself, but you've the look of no elf, Dalish or otherwise, native to these lands."
You rolled your useless eyes in their sockets, leering them somewhere off towards the left where you tracked the elf to whom the voice presumably belonged and gesturing to them sardonically, "Pardon my bluntness, but how would I know what an 'elf native to these lands' looks like if I apparently don't look it, myself? Actually, I'm a bit lost. Could you tell me where I am?"
"You," the frown was palpable in the unnamed elf's tone, "are trespassing on the borders of a Dalish camp. I ask you to either state your business here or leave these woods. Your tone suggests you would be more at home with the shemlen in one of the villages, anyway."
Well, forest had only been slightly wrong, then. Barking a laugh, you turned your head skyward for emphasis, "Oh, trespassing! That's rich. Get thrown into…wherever in Oblivion I am, blind, and be rewarded with accusations of trespassing first thing upon arrival. That's rich, really. I give you accolades for utter ridiculousness." You heard light footsteps – lighter than light, actually, but you still heard them – padding their way towards you and reacted. Drawing the dagger, you held the blade tightly with your forearm in front of you defensively, hoping that you were pointing it in at least some semblance of the right direction. A flame cloak spell itched at your subconscious, begging to be cast, but you restrained only for the sneaking suspicion that it was probably not even necessary. There was something oddly comforting about the woods – safe. But where safety lurked, so did darkness; and you felt that distinctly, too. Caution would be used in moderation.
The steps stopped, but the voice spoke up again, "You aim well, at least...for a woman appearing as unseasoned as you do."
You scoffed at that, shrugging and momentarily wondering just where your weapon was pointing, "I'm not even going to touch on how looks can be very deceiving. Moving on, I didn't mean to trespass, honest. One moment I was...standing on a mountain, and the next, I'm waking up here..."
There was a pause, sigh, and eventually the shouldering (or, what you assumed by the slight rustle of cloth to be the shouldering) of a bow, "I should take you to the Keeper, then, if what you speak is true."
"That sounds wonderful!" The sarcasm was heavy, but so was the undertone of relief as you sheathed the dagger with thankfully little trouble and called the magic back to its reserves. "Um…hate to be a bother, but could you help a disoriented elf up? I'm kind of new to the whole waking up without explanation in a very strange place thing…it's a bit dizzying. I haven't quite caught my bearings yet." The jolt of distaste for the pure dependence you felt the moment the slim hand clasped itself around your wrist, still enclosed in the tattered remains of thick leather bracers, was uncomfortable, but you reminded yourself that you didn't have a choice. You were in a place you did not recognize, stripped of your sight, both mundane and farther-reaching, and knew better than to expect anything less than a knife in the back at any given moment. You'd trust these elves (if that's even what they were – meeting one of them and only being able to hear a strange accent only told you so much) merely because there was something telling you should - an intuition, perhaps.
You weren't sure whether or not you should've been unsettled by the fact that you didn't know if it was a side effect from your newfound blindness or another sick-minded gift of pity from It. Neither option was too appealing.
"Keeper Marethari is to be respected, outsider," drawled your nameless companion as he led you along across what you recognized by feel and sound as a branch-strewn path, "so mind your words."
You allowed an eyebrow to raise slowly, "Dully noted…uh...do you have a name, by any chance?" There wasn't a response from your escort. Somewhat insulted, you turned your gaze elsewhere (or maybe you turned it upon him, you couldn't tell) in defiance. Defiance of what, you didn't know. You'd figure something out to defy. Seemed to be all you were good for as of late, acts of contempt.
Enough to show defiance, the memory spun itself, and you fought to keep your gait deceptively smooth, If all you could further yourself to be for your withering cause was a symbol of hope, a flame, then so be it. You suddenly felt sick. A symbol was all you had been, if you wished to be generous. You had done nothing. Watched, waited – you failed, and as a result, so many had lost their very beings…
"Pardon?" You snapped your head up (for what good the action did), and it took a few moments for it to sink in that you had been speaking the recalls aloud. And you didn't know why, let alone if it was remotely accurate, but you painted a proverbial mental picture of your companion in that instance. Short (a head shorter than your Altmeri height), lithe, fair haired, human in all but the sharp, slim slope of the bridge of his nose and tipped ears still of a slimmer fashion than the arched ones you sported. Wide eyes bluer than blue shrouded by fine eyebrows sat elegantly on a pale, angular face (in human terms – it was not quite as sharply exotic as your own), one raised higher than the other in what could've passed for a subdued bewilderment.
The image in your mind, you didn't answer right away. In fact, you weren't quite sure if you could've even forced the lie out that was waiting on the tip of your tongue. No, you thought instead treacherously of the lives you had left stranded to their fate. That word, "fate". It left you tired, exhausted, and angry. Fate had been malleable in your hands until the one moment when it had counted most. Then, your gifts had failed you, been stripped away, and laughed on. Fate had been nothing but a cheap excuse masking the reality that you had been bringing about the inevitable, and it was only a calamity that you had taken so long to realize it.
"Nothing," you managed to whisper finally, staring off in a direction blankly, mind perceiving darkness where you knew there should've been something and hoping that your guide would place your lack of visual contact as being distracted by your thoughts instead of sightlessness. "A memory - just a memory." The image in your mind of what your nameless companion looked like continued to stare with a curiosity burning behind his eyes, before deeming the matter too trifling to deal with and turned away to watch the path ahead. And his disregard was fine, you told yourself. It was absolutely fine.
You knew it before you set foot in this Dalish camp and could only listen to its unfamiliar, foreign clamoring that the occasion would mark the first of many times you'd wish for your sight back, so you filed the feeling away for future reference on how to subdue it. There were the sounds of nature as you had felt before when you first woke, but somehow they seemed purer the farther you were led towards the center of the elvish establishment. Sparking of life fiercely celebrated, yet as potently revered and protected, danced wildly across your tongue with every breath you drew through lips parted in respectful awe. It filled your lungs with a confident security that almost made you momentarily forget your lost vision. Songs so beautiful they were terrible rang out intermittently, broken only by the distance put between their weaver and her mobile audience. The music spoke wordlessly and yet seamlessly of love, laughter, tears, and sorrow, among other things that had you wondering not for the first time if you really were not within the blissful, illusory confines of the Aetherial Dreamsleeve your kind had once so easily damned.
Ironically, it was the very loss of the one sensory input you so wished to have in inclusion that kept you attached so thoroughly to reality. You could feel the desire for it tugging harshly at your mind and soul, begging for you to circumvent the barriers and obstacles, something you consciously knew to be impossible in any event, to obtain the once-held power you also knew could give you what you yearned for so. Thankfully, logic kept you sane from the temptation; your reluctant, but no less chivalrous, guide kept your pride solid by unknowingly guiding you around physical obstacles; and your blindness kept you so, so, so blissfully grounded to the reality it could also easily lure you from.
"Aneth ara, Fenarel," a voice called out softly from the bustle of life surrounding the "camp". You could clearly hear the trepidation within the feminine lilt and instantly knew it was because of your presence. All of a sudden, the singing and merriment stopped in allowance for a sharp, pungent stench of fear, anger, and uncertainty to settle darkly over the camp, unexplained and utterly virulent.
A nod presumably came from your escort, if the rustling sound stood for anything, "Andaran atish'an, Merrill. Do you know where the Keeper is, by chance?" Your guide, Fenarel's, voice seemed almost stiff, a little too polite when compared to the other elf, Merrill's, friendliness. Immediately, you tensed. Even though you didn't trust this Fenarel, his response to the female elf was a bit too on-edge for it to just be a general dislike. There was also an aura, though more of a suggestion than anything else, about her that you could feel even from where you stood presumably several feet away. It was magical, but it was tinged ever so slightly with darkness, desperation, pride. Danger, you realized - a threat in the making, something everyone around you seemed to also easily recognize and were quick to despise with every fiber of their collective being. It was unsettling.
To be honest, it reminded you of the lingering touch you tended to feel on someone fresh from visiting a Daedric shrine...and not one of the more harmless of the Padomaic entities, either. It seemed akin to as if the soft-spoken girl had been near the shrine to Molag Bal in Markarth or within the confines of the fort housing Vaermina's artifact, Nightcaller Temple, overlooking Dawnstar. It was an essence of one fresh from the mountain-lifted altar protected by the ever-vigilant, four-armed statue of Mehrunes Dagon in all of his terrible, shameful glory. It was akin, but ever-so-slightly different, and something tugged at your mind to recognize that dissimilarity as the most significant aspect to the whole conundrum pertaining as to just where you were. It was not Daedric magic saturating the elf, running, shining powerfully through her veins and permeating the very soil upon which she stood, reaching tentative tendrils of potent, intangible flame out to touch the magika in your own blood, teasing, testing it, testing you. No, it wasn't quite chaotic enough to be Daedric. It felt closer to Aedric, but it wasn't even truly the orderly, hard-to-touch form of power, either. The one thing you were sure about, though, was that it was slowly, so agonizingly slowly, being diseased by something you couldn't place, and it actually frightened you.
There was a stranglehold on the poor girl that threatened to overtake her, and it made you almost understand the seemingly unwarranted wariness of the others around you.
"She is with Ashalle," Merrill fretted, seemingly oblivious of the hostile atmosphere directed towards her, or perhaps she was just very good at ignoring it, "discussing something about M-Mahariel. Why do you need her? Is it about who you have with you? She seems rather strange to be Dalish. Is she from one of the cities? Oh, I've heard stories about the elves that live with the shemlen. Are any of them true?" Her soft voice broke at the utterance of the second name, though she continued to babble on almost endearingly. The already thick atmosphere seemed to dampen yet further with depression, and logic told you "Mahariel" was a touchy subject. A part of you wondered if Merrill had been the cause of whatever made the name so poisonous. It certainly explained why her own people seemed to hate her so much.
Fenarel's response wasn't just chilled; it was downright cold, and you frowned. Surely, whatever Merrill did was not cause for such unwarranted frigidity for asking a simple inquiry, regardless of the severity carried by whatever previous acts that caused the rest of the people around you to fear her so much. "Perhaps - I hardly see where it is your concern."
"Lethallin, you don't mean that," said the girl confusedly - she'd been oblivious to the negative attention, then, "as the Keeper's First it's my responsibility to -"
The poor girl was cut off quickly, "You're lucky the Keeper decided to allow you to stay with the Clan, and that is all. What you're planning on doing...it can't end well, Merrill, and you're disregard for everything the Keeper taught you, every respect she and the Clan paid you as her First, will be the downfall of us all if you don't stop." There was a whimper of a tone that told you it came from Merrill, and you snapped. You shuffled a step ahead, drawing yourself directly next to Fenarel instead of slightly behind and to his left as you had been, opening your mouth to fire off some comment that would probably get you cast out of the (begrudgingly) welcoming group of honest-to-Trinimac civilized people as quickly as your life had been spared. It wasn't your place among these strangers to tell them what you thought of their ways (if what they were doing to the girl even was along such lines), but you also knew that you couldn't just stand by and watch when you could've yet done something...
... enough to show that maybe – just maybe – all was not as lost as it seemed in those last few seconds where someone could yet do something...
Stone roaring across stone as the mountain around you began to crumble...
...when you had done nothing but stand and watch.
A gasp tearing itself from your throat drew the attention from Merrill to you, and you welcomed it, if you were to be honest with yourself. The memory finished playing once you stuffed it unceremoniously back into the recesses of your mind, though unfortunately not without bringing the soul-crushing guilt with it that was becoming clearer and clearer still you had no hope of ever avoiding. At least, no hope of avoiding in entirety - if scattered moments of peace from the self-revile were all you would be able to manage for the rest of your pitiful existence then scattered moments you would take. It was better than nothi -
NO. You wouldn't - you couldn't...!
"Are you alright, child?" The voice was new, soothing, yet rougher-sounding and speaking of an age greater than those around you. But first and foremost, it was unfamiliar, and you reacted, drawing your dagger and spinning around wildly, untamed in both panic and instinct. You settled somewhere to your left, weapon held firmly and one of its sharp, decorated glass edges not quite touching the skin of a thin neck you in some way just knew to be there. What came next was almost expected. Blades singing their deadly warning as they were swiftly sprung from their sheathes and bows drumming a countdown as arrow upon arrow was knocked, drawn, and pointed almost assuredly at your head. Your heart was clobbering around wildly in your chest, a rabid climber desperately trying to find a foothold on a smooth cliff face. It was warranted no such luxury and continued its race, causing you to feel dizzy and even more disoriented than before as the fright really began to grasp at you tightly.
Without your sight, it took you a bit longer than it normally would have to remember where you were. You took the slightest bit of familiarity you felt from the area around you, the presences of Fenarel and Merrill, memories of the terse conversation before, and latched onto them. Hanging from those shredded threads, you pushed your way past the instinctual reaction to defend yourself against something you couldn't see, and unclenched the fist holding the dagger quicker than one could say "disarm". A clattering sound rose up, along with the alarming smell of dirt becoming ever-so-slightly stronger where the ground was disturbed, and you sucked in a shaky, welcome breath in an attempt to calm your fluttering heart. The recession of your adrenaline rush left you with subtle tremors that you willed yourself to ignore with practiced ease. It wasn't the first time you'd had to run on fear, and while you handled the crash well through experience, that didn't mean you had to like it.
"Mara's mercy," you breathed once your hand lowered itself back to your side, hoping that showing you didn't intend to make a move for your dropped dagger could somehow soothe the bristled fur of the clansmen, "I apologize for that. Did I hurt you?"
The aged voice almost held a chuckle to it, "I am unharmed. I could ask the same of you. You were unresponsive for several minutes."
Oh.
"I'm fine," you frowned. It had felt like it had only been a couple of seconds..."Just a...bad memory...I do apologize, again. I didn't hear you coming and just...reacted."
"I walked up in front of you, child. You would've seen me."
"I was lost in thought. I didn't see you."
There was a long, thoughtful pause. By the time the old woman's voice spoke again, you were close to fidgeting, "You are blind." It was a statement, not a question. Your eyes flickered around uselessly in your nervousness, as if itching to prove the point you had tried so futilely to hide with their new nature of being perpetually unfocused. Then again, with being so new to sightlessness, you hadn't any experience with even functioning with such a disability, much less functioning flawlessly. It really had never been a question of if someone would find out; it was more a question of when.
"Astute of you to realize...," you admitted unhappily.
"Keeper!" a voice from the crowd suddenly crowed in sputtering disbelief. So the woman was Marethari, then... "You can't honestly believe that she cannot see! She was a hair's breath away from slicing your neck!"
The pause that ensued spoke of nothing less than a horrifyingly stern look that made your own skin crawl as if it was directed at you, "I am quite sure, Ashalle. Just because you question my decisions ever since the incident with the Eluvian does not mean the sincerity I place behind them has wavered with your trust." That shut the woman who had spoken up rather quickly. You shifted on your feet awkwardly, having settled from your earlier panic attack as much as you supposed the situation would allow you to.
Coughing lightly in an attempt to vanquish your nervousness, you managed to stammer, "I, uh...I don't wish to be a bother. If you just point me to the nearest city, I can be out of your hair..." Hopefully, figures of speech carried over to...wherever you were...
"Nonsense," the grizzled voice of this Keeper woman warbled soothingly, "you are injured. The least we can do is aid you with your wounds and help you recover your bearings." Murmurs rose, mostly hostile, at the declaration. After Marethari's swift dismissal of Ashalle's protests, however, no one dared speak in more than a conspiratorial whisper that you couldn't help but overhear. Most of the words were hissed in an elegant, foreign tongue you thought mildly similar to Altmeris, but the almost reprimanding tones were hard to miss.
It was quickly giving you a headache...and an earache, come to think of it...
...wait...
"Injured...?" Your brows pinched together, brain only then registering the tingling ache of your burned wrists from the shackles you'd almost completely forgotten about. A cracked and bleeding rope burn along the left side of your neck was also beginning to make itself known from where the hemp leash had been yanked against too harshly, and you cringed as the iron scent of your blood finally registered through the cacophony of sensory overload you had only barely managed to begin sifting through.
Damn the Divines; damn the Godhead; damn the Aldmer; and damn the bloody Thalmor.
The thick silence shook you out of your thoughts, and you swore you could feel Marethari and the rest of the gathered elves staring at you expectantly. You could stay and allow the people you didn't fully trust or understand to help you. After all, you were in a strange place and suddenly blind. Truth be told, you were half expecting to wake up at any moment and find that everything was just another fever-fueled dream, or realize it was an illusion placed upon you in order to get you to spill the secrets muddled within your mind that were so desperately coveted by your enemy. In that case, what was the harm in staying if it wasn't real?
On the other hand, if it wasn't a dream or the woven trickery of magic, how long could this new world, a shining gem of hope you hadn't let yourself feel in what felt like an eternity, last? Practically, if you had made it there after the dissolution of Nirn, you couldn't have been the only one. Your fears were merely caution if these potential others were not Thalmor; they were more than understatements if they indeed belonged to the Altmer-driven faction. If that was true, every moment you remained with the elves was another moment damning them to the fate you had narrowly escaped yourself. Maybe it had been luck, but you wouldn't let what happened to Nirn happen again. You couldn't.
But by the Gods, you were bloody blind...
"I...," you frowned apprehensively, "I suppose I don't really have another option, thank you..."
A warm hand gently clasped your bared right shoulder where the pauldron had been ripped away, and the impression conjured by your mind of a slim, grey-haired, elderly woman with a face decorated in intricate, swirling yellow lines smiled at you gently through thin lips and wide, kindly green eyes. The robes she wore were elegant and feathered, denoting rank, but the well-loved air evoked by frayed hemlines and the occasional mended tear also gave them, and their wearer, the respect demanded of age. Power also radiated off of her, you noted. It was much like what seeped from meek Merrill's bones, though without the oily shadow of the malicious sabre cat threatening to engulf it in despair. In fact, Marethari's power felt refreshing, if unfamiliar.
Marethari hummed as she led you gently away, dismissing the gathered crowd, Fenarel and Merrill included, "I do not believe we have had the luxury of a proper greeting. I am Keeper Marethari, though I suspect you gathered such." You managed a nod as the hand on your shoulder shifted. The image of Marethari faded from your mind, your concentration broken enough for your imagination to fade with the rise of conversation.
"Lys...my name is Lys." It wasn't the whole truth, you supposed, but it wasn't a lie. You weren't sure who to trust in earnest, and Lys was a nickname you often went by anyway.
She seemed almost taken aback for a moment, "What of your surname, child?" You didn't answer immediately. You just shook your head, gnawed on your chapped lower lip for a moment, and stared blankly ahead.
Floundering briefly, you finally sucked in a breath and answered sheepishly, "...Ralvayn." Sure, it didn't sound pretty...but it was appropriate. What was the use of your old name here? If others did follow you, it only made you more of a target. And it wasn't like she needed it anymore.
Yes, Ralvayn would do quite nicely...
Final Words: So, I apologize for anything sounding off or rushed. I was stuck on this for the longest time and I've been struggling through depression and insomnia lately. I meant to have this out months ago, but it just didn't happen that way. Sorry :(
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed. I'm going to try to have the next chapter out soon enough, but I can't really promise anything.
You know the drill - R&R!
~SurreptitiousFox
